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An innovator of “one of the key building blocks of the Internet” has forecast that Facebook – hugely popular in the world of social media marketing – could suffer a similar fate as AOL and IBM because of its closed model, according to an article published by the Guardian.

Speaking at an event organised by the newspaper, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf warned that the popular social networking site was at risk of alienating public desire for an open model – one that would allow users to go from site to site with little trouble.

Drawing on past examples provided by AOL and IBM, Cerf noted that when the former began in 1983, it originally employed a “a walled garden model” and “persisted for quite a while until the users of AOL forced it to be made accessible to the internet.”

IBM, he said, also used a similar model until it was forced to adapt its computers to be accessible with the Internet as “users didn’t want to be locked in” as a result of using one particular type of computer hardware.

Cerf went on to forecast that Facebook’s current “ability to connect to people inside the walled garden” would eventually fall victim to “a desire to interconnect” to other sites on the Internet.